Diffraction Teacher Resources

An in-depth encyclopedia article from Wikipedia on waves gives a definition for what a wave is. Other content in the article includes a list of examples and characteristics of waves, information about the difference between transverse...

This site has several lessons all about sound. It introduces sound, then covers major principles of waves and the wave equation. Each lesson has interactive activities to keep you interested, and there are even some test questions.

Analyze light by creating a CD spectroscope in this activity. See the whole spectrum of light with the spectroscope.

Students use authentic spectral data from the Cassini mission of Saturn and Saturn's moon, Titan, gathered by instrumentation developed by engineers. Taking these unknown data, and comparing it with known data, students determine the...

Students use the spectrograph from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about different light sources. Using the data, they make comparisons between the light sources and make conjectures about the composition of...

Students use the spectrograph from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about light sources. Using their data, they make comparisons between different light sources and make conjectures about the composition of a...

Instructions for making a scratch hologram. Includes interesting anecdotes, background information, and links to other holography sites.

In this series of interactive physics tutorials, students will focus on the wavelike nature of light.

Students investigate an example of interference that provides further evidence in support of the wavelike behavior of light.

A tutorial which introduces students to the dispersion of light in more detail, and investigates the reasons why different frequencies of light bend or refract different amounts when passing through the prism.

A short biographical sketch of Thomas Young's (1863- 1942) life as a mathematician and a scientist. Gives an account of his birth and the final years of his life.

A short tutorial providing general information about waves, their categories, properties and behaviors. Includes several animations and some practice questions with answers.

Light travels as transverse waves and can travel through a vacuum. Sound travels as longitudinal waves and needs to travel through a solid, liquid or gas. Read about the properties of light and of sound, and learn the differences between...

A study guide for concepts related to wave optics.

Wikipedia provides the definition of the term, "Atomic number," a term used in chemistry and physics to represent the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom.

Discusses the characteristics of sound waves and the conditions that affect the speed of sound.

Acting as a subtopic of the General Chemistry Virtual Textbook's section on Atoms and the Periodic Table, this site discusses wavelength and the uncertainty principle. Information is also provided on de Broglie wavelength and electron...

Read about the six experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty), TOTEM (TOTal Elastic and...

A collection of video lectures from a physics course focusing on vibration and waves taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The course overviews topics dealing with mechanical vibration and waves with twenty-three lectures....

Discusses Rayleigh scattering in plain language and attributes the blueness of the skies to this phenomenon. Discussion of scattering is just one topic of many on this lengthy page of optical topics.

This site from the Wikipedia Encyclopedia provides an overview of the life of scientist Henry Moseley. This open-source encyclopedia site discusses his contribution to science and how he found a systematic relation between wavelength and...

This site from ScienceWorld provides a very short but factual biographical sketch of Thomas Young (1773-1829 CE) and describes his most notable scientific discoveries and contributions. Links are also provided throughout for additional...